NSIS decompiler

Question

Anyone familiar with NSIS decompiler (google wasn't :-) )

Thanks, E

Answer 1

Google it again.

NSIS "Can I decompile an existing installer"

Short answer: no.

Long answer: it might be possible using 7Zip or other decompresser but there are no guarantees and would likely take a lot of work to reconstruct the original script.

Answer 2

I assume from your question that you want to reverse engineer a NSIS installer into a Windows Installer database. There are commerical programs called "Repackagers" that basically capture the state changes made by a given process or installer and transform them into an MSI project. Note that these programs only capture 1 instance of the business rules from the NSIS package. Sometimes it is needed to run the process more then once, anaylize the behavior differences and manually author them into your install.

I wrote a blog about this almost six years ago:

http://blog.deploymentengineering.com/2004/12/chriss-rant-about-repackaging.html